While I don't personally do this - I try to follow node idiom of having each package be a relatively thin layer of functionality and having packages depend on e

While I don't personally do this - I try to follow node idiom of having each package be a relatively thin layer of functionality and having packages depend on each other, I believe that you don't need to use relative paths if you don't want to. For example, if your package is called my-node-module and you have something in my-node-module/lib/app/dir/thingy/wotsit/jimminy.js, it can reference something in my-node-module/lib/server/alf.js by simply going require("my-node-module/lib/server/alf.js"); There's no need for the relative path at all. It's possible that this only works if your package is in an node_modules directory (which it will be if it's installed as a dependency), but I always symlink my development directory to node_modules anyway.